Upgruntled

I've invented a new word today. Upgruntled. It is the word that describes the feeling of a gadget lover when they find that one of their pride and joy gadgets has been superceeded by a new model and is therefore no longer the one to have. My lovely Fuji FinePix F1o has now been upgraded to the F11. The new one looks exactly the same (apart from the name). It probably produces identical pictures, although it has some new fangled picture modes. And my F10 is still brilliant.

But I still feel upgruntled.

Dodgy Moon

Dug out my moon picure today. Not too bad, but then again it could be a hole in a piece of card.....

Bradford Bound

Number one son and I toddled off to Bradford today to visit our chums at Matrix Multimedia. We are doing some stuff with them which is great fun (but we mustn't let them find out that we enjoy doing it or they'll cut our rates).

Anyhoo, the meeting went well and on the way back I persuaded number one son to take some pictures out of the car window:

You do get some nice skies at this time of the year.

Stealth Jokes

I like stealth jokes. These are the ones you can slip under the humour radar without anyone noticing. We were talking about ET in coffee (I forget why). I asked Derek what ET was short for. The answer is, of course, because he only has little legs. Nobody noticed the joke for a while. And then when they did they wished they hadn't.

Weak Minded and Strong Meetings

We all went shopping today. I feel bad about the fact that I bought a new toy, but it is very nice and replaces an old one. I'm going to put a review of the new device onto the TinyThings site as a service to gadget lovers everywhere. I'll put a link up there later. I make all these resolutions not to buy anything silly and then I find that they have one in stock and it looks really neat and will change my life and then..... Ho hum. At least I don't drink or smoke.

We had lunch at an "all you can eat" chinese place in the middle of Hull which was really nice. Get a bit of everything, find out what you like and then go back and get a plate full of it. And they had jelly. The only sad thing about the trip was that the middle of Hull was looking super duper and I had forgotten my camera.

Then back to work for a quick meeting. I've long known the secret of meeting success. You must make sure that everything that you talk about doing is written down and assigned to people who are going to do it. Then you can review the progress at the next meeting. Sounds simple but not everyone does it.

Stupid Printer

Needed some printing in a hurry this morning. Stupid printer wouldn't work. Didn't work last week either, so I wasn't able to print out my maps to Doncaster (as if I'd forget where it is). I was in the middle of a good cursing session when I noticed the printer cable dangling down the side of the desk. A couple of weeks ago I unplugged the printer for some reason, and I hadn't plugged it back in.

Still think it is a stupid printer though, it should have told me that it wasn't plugged in.

Cars as Ornaments

Washed the car today. It is now properly shiny and I daren't drive it anywhere.

Happy Family

We now have all the family under one roof for christmas. The network is running slow for me and all the milk has vanished from the fridge.

Big Moon

Apparently the moon is very big at the moment. I've noticed this. I've also tried to photograph it. Unfortunately cameras are not very good at capturing things like the moon in a dark sky, and so what I ended up with could have been quite easily replicated using a piece of card with a hole in it. Apparently I'll have to wait another 18 years for another chance. Oh well.

Little known facts about the moon: Number one and only:

The combined width of three matchsticks held at arm's length will more than cover the moon in the sky.

Meal Out and Marking

It was the departmental christmas lunch today. Good food, good conversation (I didn't say much) and a good time was had by all. Then I went back to my office and did some marking. Who says I don't know how to have a good time?

Filthy Car Blues

My shiny new car is filthy. Really filthy. We did some country driving yesterday and now the poor thing is wearing big chunks of the land. Looks like I'm going to have to wash it again. I always wash cars by hand. I've never been keen on automatic car washes since a memorable occasion a while back with a previous car when the carwash removed a radio antenna, scratched all the paint and then hot waxed the windscreen. So I shall be out with the bucket and sponge again soon.

One place nearby has a car wash where you can use a squirty thing to cover your car with foam and then rinse it off. That looks kind of fun, but I'd be worried about the thing cutting out when I was half way through the wash. The only thing worse than a dirty car would we one which is half clean I reckon. It might even affect the handling.

tree test

tree test
Originally uploaded by RobMiles.

Christmas Shopping

Took a day off work today and went christmas shopping with number one wife. (incidently, a few people have told me that they think refering to my "signficant other" as number one wife is not the done thing. I can't see a problem with it myself. And she calls me "husband zero".)

Anyhoo, we went to Leeds so that I could buy some clothes that fit me. Apparently my wardrobe is in need of replenishment as the corners have worn off some of my shirts. I don't know; you buy these things and then, after only five years or so, they become unfit for public display. Once I was sorted it was off to look at ladies clothes for a while.

Now, some things I can be counted on to have a strong opinion about. Ask me what I feel about C# versus Java and you will be rewarded with a well structured and closely reasoned description of the advantages the former has over the latter. For three hours. Show me two items of womens clothing and ask me which is nicer however and things get more tricky. I have had considerable experience of dealing with the dread question "Which do you prefer?" but only have one peal of wisdom to impart:

If a women asks you "Which do you prefer?" she is not actually asking you which you prefer, instead she is asking you to deduce which one that she prefers and then say that one. Except sometimes, when she hates them both and is only asking you the question for callibration purposes....

But they did have some nice christmas trees in Leeds:

Got My Screws, and a Tasteful Friend

Got my screws today. The man at Staples was very helpful. So we bought some staples while we were there too.

Just what you want

Then I went round to see Chris about problems with a computer (pesky spyware). It seems that he does not have the same inhibitions re christmas lights on his house as I do....

Loose Screws

Where would we be without screws? I'm not sure who invented them. Perhaps the person who invented nails was looking for a good follow up when they saw a spiral staircase and the rest is history. I don't think that even Google knows how they came about. And also, the Google spell checker still doesnt' recognise "Google". Very strange.

Anyway, screws are jolly useful and you'd definitely know if they weren't there. Like they weren't for me today. I bought a new chair for the office and got all the bits. Except the screws. Wah! I had the plans, the right screwdriver, all the fittings, but nothing to hold them together. The chair is now a forlorn pile in the middle of the room and I've got to try and track down some replacement bits. Such is life.

And finally, questions of etiquette. Does a piece of cheese and a Snickers bar count as a two course meal? If so, which course do you eat first?

Daring Driving and Meeting Levity

Drove to Doncaster for a meeting today. It was foggy. And the world is full of idiots. I wanted to drive at a safe speed, i.e. appropriate to the conditions. The idiots around me wanted to go faster and kept whizzing past me into the thickening mist. I was therefore forced to the conclusion that I had to drive the same insane speed as all the mad people just to avoid them crashing into me. There is probably a metaphor here somewhere. I'm just glad nothing untoward happened, otherwise I'd be starring in a traffic report about now.

On a digression, the terms they use when crashes happen always strike me as strange. They say things like "..the car went out of control..." which implies that the car has a will of its own and decided to head for the nearest tree or "...the driver lost control..." which is even more odd and makes me think of the driver going "...is it in my wallet?, or perhaps on the sideboard? I'm sure that I had control here a minute ago..." just before they pile into the river. What all these euphemisms usually add up to is "the driver did something stupid" but I guess this doesn't read as well on the reports and can lead to litigation.

Anyhoo, thanks to my satnav I arrived near enough on time, and in one piece. The meeting was already deep in intense discussion when I entered and lots of earnest discussion was in progress. At one point a bunch of reports were dished out and everyone was saying things like "I've got the Business School Report, can you pass me Integrated Technology?". I like to think that I lightened the atmosphere by asking for Mr. Bun the Baker.

Increase your word power

We all went out for a meal tonight. I asked Jackie to have the Beef Stroganoff because the menu said it came with a "Timbale of Rice" and I wanted to find out what that looked like. I think it is latin for "cup full" or something. Anyhoo, the meal, conversation and wine were excellent. Ian and Jackie are moving away soon, and so we only have a few months to work our way through the rest of the strange words on the menu.

I'm up for it....

Nothing Therapy

Not had a cold for ages. This week I've been finding out what I've been missing. I woke up this morning feeling awful and number one wife just about stapled me into the bed to stop me from going to work. There is something very restful about being forced to do nothing of consequence for a while. I suppose this is what holidays and weekends are for, but they never seem to work out that way in our neck of the woods. I've spent half the day in bed and the other half footling around, doing nothing of any great importance and keeping warm.

And I feel much better.

Scrapyard Coding

One of my must watch TV programs recently has been Scrapheap Challenge (stateside it is called Junkyard Wars). Anyhoo, a bunch of engineers are given an impossible task (for example build a man powered airplane in a couple of days) and then turned loose. The results are always amazing, especially if it all goes wrong. My personal favourite was when they had to build a device to throw a Mini car as far as possible. One team made a trebuchet (a kind of catapult) which flew apart in the throwing action in a most impressive way.

I was wondering if you couldn't do something similar with programming. A team of coders is given something to produce, say an invoicing system, and then sent out into a software scrapyard to grab the bits and bobs that they need to finish the job. The commentary would be great:

"And that's a terrific start for Team Hardcoders, that disused COBOL print formatting routine will make a fantastic interface to the barrel printer that they found earlier. But what's this? The other team seem to have discovered a stash of unused GOTO statements amongst a pile of punched cards. Noooooooooo!"

Boom Boom!

I was telling number one wife about a new film, "Mrs. Henderson Entertains". It is all about the first "erotic revue" which opened in London around the time of the Second World War. The revue exploited a loophole in the law which meant that it was OK to strip for the stage - as long as you remained completely still. The film stars Judy Dench and pop idol Will Young, who at one point has to get his kit off to persuade the girls to join in.

Number one wife was intrigued. "When is it out?" she asked.

"About half way through" I replied.